My Gaming Life in Numbers

A Discussion

I'm kind of obsessed with this plot.

This is my entire gaming history, just a bunch of dots and lines. Each set, a video game I chose to play (that I have tangible data for, of course). In a way, this is my entire life from age 8 onward. These dots tell stories, their densities tell when I had time to play, when I didn't. I can point to major moments in my life, some visible in this plot with varying degrees of obviousness. My College Graduation is visible on this plot, as is when I got my Nintendo 3DS. If you know a little more about me, you might be able to explain why I suddenly stopped playing games around Fall 2013. Maybe you'll find out!

This plot is a representation of my life through little more than numbers.

I wouldn't say I obsessively recorded my gaming data, it sort of just happened. I got games as a kid on monumental days like birthdays and Christmas. I played games during holidays or in strange circumstances, the context of each imprinting in my memory parallel to the events of Easter 2011 (playing Cave Story on my DSi XL). It's easy to recall my cousin's wedding reception in 2008 because I was playing Kirby & the Amazing Mirror (2004) and failing to find the mirror to Mustard Mountain. This data sort of just accumulated over the course of my entire gaming life. I made Let's Play videos and streamed on Twitch (still do but I used to too). I kept track of my progress on websites like The Backloggery and backloggd, and in spreadsheets kept on my hard drive and Google Drive. I'm not alone in my endeavor either, technology does a lot of the work for me. Some consoles record play time and dates, like the Nintendo 3DS, an invaluable console for putting a lot of this data together. There are some data points hwere I know when I started playing the game, but cannot remember when I stopped. There are some games where I know I stopped playing a game, but cannot remember when I started it. That's how it goes sometimes. I did a lot of investigative self-journalism here to compile everything. Nowadays I keep track of all my game logging in my Obsidian note taking app.

In general, the dates of a lot of these games are later simply because I don't have the evidence to prove I played a game on a pecific date. The biggest example is the previously mentioned Amazing Mirror. While I know *FOR A FACT* that I played the game as a kid, icouldn't tel lyou dates, or for how long I played. The fact reality of the situation is that I don't have that data, and I don't want to fudge the numbers. I want this plot to be as accurate and honest as possible, because I myself want to be as accurate and honest as possible.

I'm still thinking about ways I can improve this plot. Ways I can backfill any data I might be able to find. There are some games I've played that aren't on this plot because I haven't given them a numerical rating. I might eventualy backfill these as well, but if I do so, I want the personal ratings I give these games to be honest and accurate about how I feel about them. It's hrad to know how I feel about a game if I only play it for at most fifteen minutes.

If you're curious about why a certain point is higher or lower on the vertical axis, please read "On Rating and Bias"!

Okay, but this is just a bunch of dots and lines, which games are they?

I'm glad you asked!

You can click on the image at the top of the page to see the full-sized image, OR YOU CAN CLICK HERE! (it's 5120 x 2880 !)

Specific Changes / Updates:

September 28, 2024

Changed the color scale to be a little nicer, based on a few papers I've read. I'm not quite satisfied with this since it's really diffficult to tell the difference betweenn a game I played for 5 hours, vs. 50 hours vs. 500 hours. I intend to find a way to make the color scale distribution be better about showing this, since I think that it's crucial in showing how significant some of these outliers are. Maybe I almost wonder if I should just do an entire segmented color bar? I'll figure out what works best here.

Otherwise, I've just added a few more games from last week as well as a few other older ones I have data for that I found!

September 21, 2024

I'm excited to have this page back up! Long-time visitors might have seen something like this earlier, but I wanted to revamp the graph a bit to capture the entire chrnonology in a readable way. That means I now have a working image that you can explore! It's very big! I intend to make small tweaks to the dataset long term, including figuring out how I want to account for "replays" and initial playthroughs. For example, some games that are very highly rated are games that are ORIGINALLY from periods of time wel-before they're charted here. If I can find data that supports my "iinitial play" and any specific dates of specific replays, I will definitely be retconning these data points to reflect more accurate dates. I also want to backfill things more in general, but I need to be honest about the information. What's the pointof this chart if all of it's just made up? I also am looking into altering the colors to better emphasize the logarithmic scale for total play time. It's funny, I'm actually reading some papers on this, so you might see a major style overhaul in the next few updates. We'll see soon enough for sure.